Currently, users use a variety of devices such as mobile phones, computers, tablets and so on to communicate with others. The users may also use a variety of applications such as Skype, Whatsapp, Google Hangout, Facebook, Microsoft Communicator, Yahoo Chat and so on for communication. The communication may be in the form of voice calls/chats, instant messaging, text messages, video calls/chats and so on.
These applications do not require integrating with centralized control system of circuit switched networks. These applications decouple the service plane from the network infrastructure which provides simplified development framework, making the adoption of these applications easier. To meet with the requirements, existing telecommunication signaling and control models are being extended in favor of web based protocols.
However, these applications (even if present on a single device or being used by the same user) end up competing rather than complementing each other because they are based on different underlying communication services and hence the transfer of context information from one device/application to another is nearly unachievable. Hence, these applications do not provide a true seamless end user experience.
As a real world scenario, let us consider a case of a user who is “busy” on his Skype call. As it is an important customer call and he won't like to be disturbed for the rest of the call, he wants to setup a rule for just this particular call to “Divert all calls to Voicemail”. Please note, that he wants this rule to be invoked for this particular device or this particular call only. Presently this is not possible and the requirement that a particular rule to be invoked only for a particular device and be automatically revoked once the context is over is not being met current systems.
As another use case, let us consider a user who is attending a browser video call using Skype on his laptop. The user has set “call forwarding for any incoming call” preferences for this particular Skype call. As he moves away from his laptop, he transfers this Skype call to his tablet. As soon this switch happens, the call forwarding setting configured for his laptop Skype session gets lost. In order to avail these settings, they would have to be reconfigured on that mobile/tablet as currently there is no way for automatic reconfiguration or fetching previously saved settings. So as we can see, the context information, parameters and setting are not being transferred in the present way of working.
In another example, let us assume that a user has set a particular set of rules A1, A2 and A3 based on its “Busy” status for its mobile based communication and rules A1, B1 and B2 based on its “Busy” status for laptop browser based communication. If the user is “Busy” on his mobile while “Available” on browser application, just the rules A1, A2 and A3 would be in effect. But another level of complexity would be introduced if the user's status on browser based communication also changes to “Busy”. There are many a questions to be answered in such a scenario such as—What should be the rules applied then? When should they take effect and when should those be revoked? What if some rules are conflicting with each other? Should there be some overlapping rules which should be applied or all of the rules should be enforced at the time of simultaneous parallel sessions?